Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps his Department is taking to help improve the health and wellbeing of children living in temporary accommodation.

Homelessness levels are far too high, and this can have a devastating impact on those affected, especially children.

The Child Poverty Strategy and our National Plan to End Homelessness set out our commitments to eradicate unsuitable or poor-quality accommodation and ensure children in temporary accommodation do not experience gaps in health care provision or disruption to their education.

This includes our commitment to eliminate the unlawful use of Bed & Breakfast accommodation for families by the end of this Parliament and improve the supply of good quality temporary accommodation.

Alongside this, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill will provide the strongest protections in a generation, making sure vulnerable children are identified and supported. We are also introducing a new temporary accommodation notification duty, to inform schools and specified health providers when a child is placed in temporary accommodation, to allow additional or different support to be provided to these children.

We will ensure families in temporary accommodation are proactively contacted by health services, and have committed to introduce a new clinical code, to improve data and improve outcomes in temporary accommodation, and end the practice of discharging newborns into Bed and Breakfast or other unsuitable shared accommodation.

We have also set out our ambition to cut school days lost for children in temporary accommodation, backed by data so that targeted support can be provided more effectively. To achieve this, there will be a stronger role for pastoral teams to work closely with families in temporary accommodation including preventing unlawful removal from a school’s roll.